advocating a patch

What's the best way to advocate for a Rails patch to be accepted? This seems like a general enough question when considered on the whole, but here is a specific example.

Consider this ticket: http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/5976 , posted 6 months ago.. It seems a trivial fix on the surface, but is it missing something that's holding it up?

The best way to advocate for it is to write tests demonstrating that it works. Thanks!

jeremy